November 5, 2019
Soundbites & b-roll: HuskySat-1
A University of Washington satellite smaller than a loaf of bread is now in low Earth orbit. It is the first student-built satellite from Washington state to go into space.
“HuskySat-1” is among seven student-built satellites from around the country that launched Saturday morning, Nov. 2, from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast.
The UW creation is a type of CubeSat, a small satellite that measures exactly 10 centimeters (about 3 inches) along each side. HuskySat-1 is a “three-unit” system, meaning it’s three CubeSat-sized blocks joined together. These miniature satellites were first created as a way for engineering students to test software with smaller, cheaper devices they could build from start to finish in a few years.
The UW satellite was a five-year-long project based in the Husky Satellite Lab in Johnson Hall. Undergraduate and graduate students from aeronautics and astronautics, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, earth and space sciences, physics and other departments spent hundreds of hours building the system.
After extensive testing, fitting and final checkouts this summer, UW Earth and space sciences doctoral student Paige Northway hand-delivered the satellite in September to the Nanoracks facility in Houston, where it was integrated into the deployer. It weighs 3.14 kilograms, or just under 7 pounds.
Full story and video about HuskySat-1 here.
For more information, contact Northway at northway@uw.edu or Winglee at winglee@uw.edu. Learn more at www.uwsatellite.com.
